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A common flavor of mockery is to find leftist posts about "what I'll do after the socialist revolution" and ridicule them. We were discussing the genre and the general amusement at folks that think they will have a quasi-aristocratic life: oh I'll work on the commune garden and teach embroidery and prepare meals for everyone. Weirdly, many of the posts by women ended up being weirdly trad too -- but that's a bit of a sidetrack.
Example
KYM
My friend had an important insight: there is probably a rightist/reactionary equivalent to this. That's a good observation. We came up with a few of these
The reactionary equivalent is "this is what they took from us", usually in the context of a picture of a hottie. In the defense of that meme, the pictures of beaches and cities in California where everyone is white look pretty nice and they did indeed take that from us.
"This is what they took from us" works at three levels.
The level it is okay to talk about, and is a real case where something has been lost, is that young people looked better in swimsuits back then because nobody was fat. In that specific sense, society is just uglier than it used to be. (If you look at fully clothed photos like high school yearbooks then the effect is less stark because increased wealth means people have better teeth, hair etc. which partially makes up for the fattitude.)
The level where there is an obvious dogwhistle is the mix of skin colours. I think you can make a case that something has been lost here - the idea that there used to be a time (outside a few cosmopolitan megacities) where you could assume that everyone you meet is a member of your folk community. But you can't put that in words without saying what your folk community is, and (for different reasons) neither British nor American wannabe-ethno-nationalists can do that without stepping on rakes, so they use a pictorial dogwhistle. Given the actual demographics of both the US and the UK, skin colour is a good enough proxy for folk community membership for the implied statistical inference to be valid. But the folk community is not actually defined by skin colour and the only people who actually care about the mix of skin colours on the beach as such are white supremacists.
The last point is the silly one. The period between the post-WW2 cleanup and the oil crisis was a period when the core western countries felt prosperous (even though normal-ass economic growth means that we are a lot richer than that now), so vibes-based economics associates the aesthetic of that period with material prosperity. A Tesla Model 3 is superior in every respect to a 1970 model year muscle car, but seeing a 1970 muscle car in the background of a beach photo creates a vibe of "this was a rich society" whereas a Tesla Model 3 in the background doesn't. The only thing that has actually been lost is in your head.
A model 3 might be a finer car than a 70 muscle car but the reason the picture of the teen with the muscle car looks richer is that he is. The 1970 teen can buy a brand new V-8 (not the base model) Camero after about 1800 hours at the 1970 minimum wage. Today's teen needs 2500 hours to buy a base model 3 (after the tax credit expires next month) at the median teen wage of 17/hr.
It looks like a rich society because it was a rich society. Further the 1970 teens future house and college look much much better.
So they need to work 38% more hours to get a car that is like, 500% better?
I think we're in the rich society
If we're so much richer why are 40% of teens not getting licenses today vs 20% in 1980 (the closest stat to 1970 I found).
I have no idea.
They live in cities more? They can't afford cars?
I also think income/wealth inequality is a massive issue, so I'm very comfortable saying both "our society en masse is richer than ever" and "the distribution of this wealth is completely fucked"
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